A few months ago, Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women, summed up the state of the left. “We’re winning the politics,” she told me. “But on policy, we’re just getting killed.”

On the one hand, a handily reelected liberal president; demographic trends turning more and more states blue, with no end in sight; growing public support for liberal causes like gay marriage; and a fractured, warring, dismally unpopular opposition. On the other hand, a failure on the national level to consider even modest changes to environmental, immigration, or gun policy; a federal government that, rather than growing to serve more people, has been subject to draconian cuts. On the state level, a drumbeat of assaults on collective bargaining, restrictions on access to abortion, cuts to education, taxes, and social services, and curbs to voting rights. After 20 elementary-school children died in last year’s gun massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, more states sought to expand access to guns than to constrain it.

Progressives are trapped in a frustrating dichotomy: a feeling that even though they’re winning the public argument, their policy ideas are largely an irrelevant pipe dream.

"Some of these discussions have the air of surrealism. We know what we have to do; we can't do it."

Nowhere was this more evident than at a policy summit convened Thursday by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank hatched by Clinton Administration alums during the dark days of the first George W. Bush Administration. A star-studded lineup of Democratic power players took the stage: former Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State John Kerry, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And yet their speeches and discussions were suffused with a sense of futility.

“We know what we have to do. It’s pretty straightforward,” Glenn Hutchins, a private-equity investor and former Clinton White House adviser, said from the dais toward the end of a panel on economic growth. Investments in education, infrastructure, research and development—all the types of government outlays that have been slashed by the recent federal “sequestration” cuts. “But we can’t do it,” Hutchins added. “We have a huge governing problem. So we’re stuck .... Some of these discussions have the air of surrealism. We know what we have to do; we can’t do it.”

Question after question from the audience echoed Hutchins’s angst. “I’m looking for hope given the obstruction we face from this conservative Congress,” pleaded one. “How can this message get out in the public debate and be accepted?” asked a second. Larry Summers, the former Obama economic adviser and Federal Reserve runner-up, said of the sputtering recovery, “I don’t think the problem is with financial engineering. The problem is political will."

Some of the speakers chose to ignore political reality and simply blaze ahead with their audacious dreams. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew made a pitch for pro-growth economic policies, saying hopefully, “I remain convinced that the tradition of compromise, bipartisanship, and building consensus is not a thing of the past.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York gave a passionate presentation of her five-point agenda to advance the standing of women and children, from universal pre-kindergarten (“something so obvious, so clear!”) to paid family leave and a hike in the minimum wage. The proposals, she said, were so commonsensical, “It’s surprising these ideas are not part of the dominant political dialogue today.”

Others chose to rage against the obstacles. “A self-inflicted wound like the shutdown that we just endured can never happen again,” warned Kerry, who said the nation’s political turmoil emboldened America’s enemies and diminished its credibility as a world leader. Gore, speaking in loud, folksy Southern-populist tones, thundered against the forces of “denial,” whether it be global warming, debt default, or President Obama’s American birthplace that the deniers refuse to acknowledge. “Why are we failing to act? Well, why are we failing to act on a lot of things?” he fumed. “Our democracy has been hacked! It no longer operates according to the public interest.” Gore got the only standing ovation of the day’s program.

State and local executives were cited as examples of the dreamed-of alternative, the world where Democrats are actually fully in charge and get to run things. “We are really seeing progress at the state level in making progressive change,” CAP President Neera Tanden said while introducing California Governor Jerry Brown. He illustrated, she said, “proof progressive governance works,” and exemplified “the possibility of actually making progress toward our goals.”

Brown’s speech was a doozy, a vivid portrait of frustrated liberals’ fever-dream bizarro world. He boasted of the way he’d won public passage of a series of government-reform and tax-raising ballot initiatives. He spoke of protecting undocumented immigrants from harassment and giving them rights and driver’s licenses. He talked about raising the minimum wage, tackling climate change, reducing the prison population, and running a health-care-exchange website that’s enrolling people by the tens of thousands—all while righting the state’s once-disastrous finances. Californians, Brown speculated, are progressive because the state’s beautiful landscapes make them “spiritual.” “How can these people in Washington not rise to the occasion?” he implored.

The conference featured an impressive amount of dissenting views, albeit within a somewhat narrow band. Gore inveighed against the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, calling it “an atrocity” and “a threat to our future,” but Hutchins and another speaker, Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, spoke of the project favorably. Hutchins spoke of the need for fiscal discipline; former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said progressives must have more respect for the role of the private sector as “promoters of trade and creators of jobs,” adding, “We have to see them much more as partners than just as people that are exploiting [workers]. This is not an easy message to deliver in our circles.” Emanuel defended his record of seeking public-pension cuts and closing underperforming public schools. None of these speakers were booed or heckled for their heresy.

Despite the various sins against progressivism of the Obama presidency, from its prosecution of the war on terror to its endorsement of entitlement cuts, the Democratic coalition today is remarkably unified—the result, no doubt, of an opposition singularly determined to thwart its program at all costs. And yet a reckoning is surely coming as the post-Obama era dawns, the 2016 primaries draw nigh, and liberals’ frustrations finally come to the fore. It was fitting that the day should end with Hillary Clinton, who stands as the avatar of both the Democratic Party’s past and, should she seek the presidential nomination, its potential future.

Clinton took the stage at the gala party that concluded the conference, following a slick greatest-hits video touting the center’s 10-year history. Speakers in the video recalled the bad old days under Bush and hailed the progress already made, from ending the Iraq war to winning health-care reform. Clinton, striding to the lectern amid riotous applause, said, “We share a set of values—the values of justice, of freedom, of opportunity and equality.”

And yet, she noted, the fight remains. “When you look at these values and how much the United States had to do with thrusting them into human history," she said, "it’s always a little surprising that we have to keep fighting so hard on behalf of them—to make the case over and over and over again.”

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Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.